Work Text:
The cathedral had no doors. The man could not remember entering it, only kneeling. It was always like this: he was here, he had always been here, and the stone ribs of the place arched endlessly above him.
Wind moaned through the fractured glass, scattering broken saints across the floor. They shifted when he looked too long—faces becoming wings, eyes becoming holes. The candle flames trembled as if afraid of the dark pressing in around them.
He pressed his forehead to the altar. The slab was damp, warmer than stone should be, as though it had absorbed the devotion of countless bodies before his. His lips moved in prayer, but no words came. He did not remember when he had last spoken clearly. The prayers lived in his throat like rot, heavy and unsayable, leaking from him instead as breath and silence.
The silence was holy, he told himself. A god could dwell in absence as easily as presence. But that absence pressed into his chest until he thought he might break open beneath it.
Perhaps he already had.
He raised his hands. They were not hands, not anymore. Scar tissue looped across the knuckles like crude script. White and puckered, they glistened faintly in the candlelight as though freshly made. When he looked at them too long, he thought he saw the scars shift, rearranging themselves into new commandments.
Sometimes, when he closed his eyes, he heard them. The wounds whispering. The lips of his flesh murmuring. He tried to bind them shut with cloth, but the cloth soaked through with words instead of blood, dark syllables he dared not read.
He burned the linen in a bowl of coals, choking on the smoke, muttering apologies for his doubt, for his sins.
The altar drank from him. He let the knife draw its familiar line across his palm, and the blood dripped down like rosary beads falling one by one. Each drop spread across the stone in shapes that resembled script. He leaned close, aching to decipher, but the letters swam away, dissolving like ink in water.
He wept then, upon the stone, though he did not know why. This was holy. This was devotion. His tears tasted of iron.
Sleep never came cleanly.
He floated instead through corridors that might have been ribs, ceilings that arched like spines. The crucifix above the altar grew taller each night, its figure peeling itself loose, inch by inch, until its mouth hung wide in an endless hymn.
In those dream-halls he saw his own body unspool. His scars split into mouths, into eyes, into wet openings that whispered prayers he had never spoken. He woke to the sensation of humming under his skin, a low choir that rose from marrow instead of throat. His body sang without him.
He pressed his palms to his ears to drown it out, but the song lived deeper than hearing.
The voice came at last—not in words but in substance.
It entered him like marrow cracking, like a jaw splitting. A sound without air, a resonance in bone. It told him what must be given.
He shook his head until his teeth rattled. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. He wept again, mouth open, but no sound emerged. The words clotted in his throat. His body bent forward without his will. His hand sought the knife as though it had been waiting for this moment all along.
The cathedral leaned with him. Walls folded closer, shadows groped down like fingers, and the stained glass no longer glowed but bled, colors dripping into pools across the floor.
The first cut was reverent. The second was desperate.
Pain flooded him. He opened wider, deeper. His blood ran hot across the stone, steaming faintly as it struck. The altar swallowed it greedily, grooves darkening, shivering, as though it had veins.
He staggered, slumping against the slab, every breath dragging a tremor through his ribs. The cathedral convulsed. Candles went out one by one, leaving only the red glow of the altar. The glass burst, shards scattering like teeth across the floor.
Something unfolded from the dark. Not descending, not arriving—simply becoming visible, as though it had always been here.
His god. His lovely, terrible god.
A crown of mouths, arms uncountable, each hand reaching and withdrawing in the same motion. Its face was not a face at all but a tide of openings, of teeth and tongues. Each mouth opened, each mouth spoke, and the sound was his own prayer echoed back in a thousand tongues.
He wanted to scream no. He wanted to scream yes. His mind buckled, torn between horror and awe.
“This is You,” he whispered. His lips quivered, his words fractured. “This is You—this is You—”
But a sob broke the prayer.
The god’s mouths sang, a harmony of his own voice multiplied until it drowned him. His chest heaved with panic, but the sound that left him was not a cry, not a plea, not a scream—only another prayer, spilling out against his will.
He wept as the voices overtook him. His tears were hot, frantic, and he could not tell if they came from joy or despair.
His scars split wide. Flesh peeled back, and the mouths in his arms joined the chorus, his body ringing with the same impossible note. He clawed at himself, but the mouths only widened, singing through the blood.
Faith requires all, they said. Faith requires all.
The words reverberated in his marrow, filling him, tearing him apart.
He tried to scream, but the god was already speaking through him. He fell to his knees. His vision blurred. The walls swam with faces. The crucifix melted into bone and ash, its figure grinning down at him with his own features.
His heart stuttered between ecstasy and terror until there was no difference, until his panic became worship, until his worship became panic, until he was only voice and blood and silence.
Morning came.
The cathedral was silent. The altar glistened with what it had drunk. And the husk kneeling before it whispered endlessly through a hundred new mouths, prayers spilling into a silence that had never left.